If you revert that last edit; please place the correct language in its place, since what was there is incomplete. If no one is able to do that, it just reflects upon the fallacy of the P.G. reconstructions here! You are welcome to leave a message on my talk page. Andrew H. Gray 11:13, 17 November 2018 (UTC)Andrew (talk)

That makes sense. However, although it stated "compare" that would normally use "cog", it was a comparison of its origin, however false the P.G. reconstructions are. Anyway, it is much better like it is! So thank you for adding the correct code. Kind regards. Andrew

Latin nascor and and nascere

Why did you change the etymologies of Romance descendants of Lat. nascor to just Lat. nascor or nasci (the deponent verb), without Vulgar Lat. nascere? Are you saying they all formed simply by some conscious act of analogy later? I'm pretty sure it looks like there was some proto-Romance form they all sprung out of, at least. Also, nascĕre was attested in some Latin anyway.

On the other hand, could it be analogous to e.g. bedrog ~ bedriegen, but without an ablaut available (due to it being a late formation)? Bezwaar doesn't seem to have ever denoted a concrete activity, unlike the verbal nouns on ge-.

I disagree. And I stand by my comment that if you are going to remove the categories, you should then immediately add them to the data module. Otherwise, you're just pedantically orphaning a category.

Manually adding categories is a useful stopgap for (the vast majority of) people who don't mess with data modules. And, IMO, it's ridiculous to base categorization on something that few people other than you can understand.

*weghs

I am curious what you didn't like about my edit. I cited it. Perhaps it is that I didn't use the correct formatting and templates? I find that side of wiktionary quite counterintuitive. In general the IE pages are very good, but they rely too heavily on the Leiden school, and I have been trying here and there, when I have time to make adjustments that achieve a more well rounded position. Thanks. --Tibetologist (talk) 06:43, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

I stumbled across this thread, and reading through, I wondered too at your meaning. While ibid is indeed known well enough in various other works, the specifics of how Wiktionary function can make it risky to assume that ibid will always be correct in its particular context.

For instance, suppose the list of descendants were sorted alphabetically by language name. If your line for Old Church Slavonic were placed above your line for Sanskrit, the ibid ceases to make any sense. Alternatively, suppose some other language were inserted between the two, and the new line includes a different citation.

If you intended for your second citation to simply refer to the first, try using the name="xyz" attribute on the <ref> tag instead, and simply use the same value for both attributes. So long as there is one <ref> tag on the page with the same name and full details, the other instances of that identically-named <ref> tag can be empty.

There's also no discussion at rfvn for sbgzpfnoxmtn, for the same reason: no one has ever created a German entry for it. Perhaps it's an obsolete spelling- it seems like it should have an "h" in it for a modern word. Also, see GermanFähre.

I must say that I dare doubt this word too, for my knowledge of German unlike with the other languages has reached a state of completion. And I cannot find usages of it in any spelling on Google Books which I should as Germany has invented printing with movable types. The lexicographic resources I have consulted for New High German and Middle High German lack it strangely too, is this possible for a word from Proto-Germanic? I could imagine it as as a dialectal word at the most. So I find a fêren “rudern” in the Swiss Idioticon the identity of which I cannot insinuate nor deny however. And why is Middle Low German varen in the descendant list when it is from *faraną, identical to the well-known High German fahren? Ghost-word alarm.

Missing documentation

Proto-Germanic - 'Landawulfaz'

I just wanted to turn your attention to this page that was created by an anonymous user. As I'm not a moderator or administrator, I've never known how to propose a page be deleted (I left a message on the talk page but so far nobody's seen it). Regards --Theudariks (talk) 19:31, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Unexplained deletions: continuing what appears to be a common theme

The purpose of including reconstructions in Wiktionary is not to posit them with some claim of certainty, nor is it to say “here is a theory the details of which are unilaterally agreed upon,” but rather more along the lines of “there is evidence for the existence of this, though as a reconstruction it is by nature hypothetical,” as disclaimers such as {{reconstruction}} are clear about.

I fear that you are letting your personal range of experience and particular set of opinions get in the way of constructive discussion. The theory of Altaic for one is certainly not unilaterally accepted either, nor are the particulars of the phonetics of Proto-Sino-Tibetan or Proto-Afro-Asiatic, or even Old Chinese—hell, there is still much disagreement about PIE—but in the same sense that settling on a particular phonological model for the time being shouldn't prevent Wiktionary entries for these languages from existing, neither should disagreement about families like Altaic prevent there from being any inclusion of them, as is evident already. If the assumption is that there is something inherently wrong in describing such hypotheses, what is it that is wrong? This is not a matter of whether a scholarly interest exists (it most certainly does) nor a matter of whether there is consensus among any subset of scholars working on the areas in question (there is); instead, you are in danger of now turning it into an issue of neutrality. You did not provide any rationale for the deletions either in prior discussion or retroactively (and I can only guess that your expectation was that I come to you). Other than useless deletionism I do not see any grounds for it. It is not in the same ballpark as modifying or deleting PIE paradigms in favor of alternative models: in this case your choice has been to wipe the (only) information out of existence without hesitation. Regardless, I can only hope that future incidents of this form do not take this path.

I suppose the reason for deleting them is that the reconstructions are founded on poor scholarship using questionable methods which very few people believe. Other than that, the entries are fine, I guess...

Such as what? And in what sense? Quality? (If so, what specifically?) Quantity? (If so, I agree that it is lacking. But there has been a considerable amount of work done since over century ago.)

“questionable methods”

Again, such as what?

“very few people believe”

That may be so. Sadly very few people, relatively speaking, have any knowledge of or interest in comparative linguistics. But, assuming you are referring exclusively to comparative linguists, I would like to know what counts as “very few”. Not that I am contesting that there are few: I would simply like a genuine reference point on which to base the observation of how many of the whole agree with the methodology used and conclusions drawn, and which whole. I don't expect that there have been many surveys on comparative linguists' opinions at large; however, as for the number of linguists who have worked on the areas in question, is it any less than for protolanguages such as those of Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian or “Altaic”? In each case the picture is overall the same: two, maybe three, large works which are regarded as the standard, separate and collaborative efforts among a handful of well-known names, and other small contributions by a larger number of lesser-known names. (Of course this description then also leads to the issue of defining “well known”: how much?, and, more importantly, by whom?) Whether the opinions of those who do not study these areas is just as relevant as the opinions of those who do is another question, though perhaps more relevant to the philosophy of ways of knowing. Both you and Rua are evidently very experienced, in the areas relevant to what you have studied, but there seems to be no objective manner in which to discern whose beliefs matter to what—other than the principle that Wikimedia administrators are granted the unquestioned last word!

I don't know a single linguist who regards Nostratic as anything more than a bad joke. I think you're aware that there might be a reason almost nobody takes it seriously. But yes, it's definitely the work of a shady cabal of Wiktionary administrators trying to keep the truth locked away...

Well, it sounds like you might benefit from expanding your knowledge of linguists then. :)

As for your implication that I regard this as some sort of conspiracy, thanks for the laugh! In reality, though, work on the theories of such families as Nostratic and Indo-Uralic continue regardless of what Wiktionary or Wikipedia have to say on them (which are, respectively, nothing and almost nothing).

Woe/boe

Please note that Rua is inactive and likely will not respond to this message. As for the issue at hand, I think that the usage example, though suboptimal, is fine. As always, usage examples can be improved by replacing them with quotations from books.

Module:el-translit

I'm reluctant to edit this myself, please can you help again. el-translit allows for letter combinations at the beginning of an entry - but not at the beginning of a word preceded by a space (illustrated by:

!important

Hi. You recently added !important to a lot of declarations in Common.css. Why?

This is bad practice in general. It buggers up accessibility for users who have to apply their own user CSS in the browser to be able to read. It overrides inline styles, for example where it has neutralized the display of italic letters in the tables in Appendix:Russian alphabet and Appendix:Ukrainian alphabet. —MichaelZ.2013-09-08 05:50 z

I had hoped that it would mean that those declarations would apply even if another element would override it. Essentially I wanted it to mean "always apply this, prevent it from being italic under any circumstances". That didn't work, though, so I think it can be removed?

Well, !important makes a declaration take precedence over all other declarations that select the same element. But the cascade still continues to work for elements contained within the selected element.

So .Cyrl { --- !important; } will trump the more-specific i.Cyrl { ---; }, but not neuter all declarations for child elements like .Cyrl i { ---; }.

The CSS3 spec[1] implies this, but doesn’t say it explicitly. It does, however, list some situations where !important could be useful.

Yes, these !importants should all be removed. Because !important breaks the normal cascade, it makes debugging a nightmare. It should only be used for outstanding circumstances, not as a shortcut for appropriate more-specific selectors.

You could use the following, although it may fail in various ways (e.g., an English phrase that contains italics quoted within a Russian paragraph):

i.Cyrl, .Cyrl i,em.Cyrl, .Cyrl em{ font-style: normal; }

But because the language attribute is inherited by child elements, the right way to do it is for each language:

CSS ignores the rest of the language code beyond the first fragment, so :lang(sh-Cyrl) or :lang(*-Cyrl) selects nothing. This may seem unfortunate, but we really should be simplifying the code instead of complicating it as browsers’ language support improves. The typographic ideal is one font-family and font-size for all languages, rather than one for each language.

You could also use the universal selector to explicitly select an element and all of its descendants. Is is simple and will override unanticipated italics in elements other than i and em, but still can be overriden by still-more specific declarations and in inline CSS. It could still break in nested languages.

Hi! Would you mind adding sources to those protoforms? I want to mention them in the etymology section of Latvian zobs, and it would be better to mention sourced reconstructions so that I can footnote them. Thanks in advance!

Well, if they are better known reconstructions, then they are published somewhere, right? I mean, you saw at least zǫbъ somewhere, didn't you? And you checked it when you created the page (say, to avoid misspellings), didn't you? Can't you say where?

As for źambas, when you say it "could hardly have been anything else", am I correct in assuming that you've done the reconstruction yourself (i.e., made yourself the step of saying it's PBS), rather than having seen it done/claimed by someone else?

I found a source: Rick Derksen, Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon. It gives the form *źombos, but that's the same because o and a merged in Balto-Slavic. I'm not sure why he chose o and not a as the product of the merger, because as far as I know all of the evidence and consensus agrees with a. The same entry also gives zuobs as the Latvian form...?

The Latvian letter "o" is used to represent the diphthong [úo] (actually more like [úə]), which Baltic specialists tend to retranscribe as <uo> so as to stress the fact that it is a diphthong. It's normal practice, like also adding intonation markers to Latvian (and Lithuanian) that are not part of standard spelling, as well as (for Latvian) also using some device to mark the difference between /e/ and /æ/ (both spelled <e> in Standard Latvian), e.g. <ę> for [æ].

If your source mentions *źombos rather than *źombas, then how do you know *źombas is really better? If the 'evidence and consensus' etc. point to it, then there should be something that can be cited to support that, right?

Look, I'm not trying to be a spoilsport or something. I am just not a Balto-Slavicist, and I feel confused and less likely to trust what I see (since I'm not familiar with the Balto-Slavic literature -- which is certainly the case of most Wiktionary users) if I see unsourced reconstructions or divergences/variations. Wouldn't it be a good service to the average user to add this information to the PBS, PS (and PIE for that matter) pages? I mean, Wiktionary is also about giving the best possible information, right?

I agree, but the difference between źombos and źambas is really trivial. o and a were the same phoneme in Balto-Slavic, so they are two letters for the same reconstructed sound. The only case I can think of where the difference between them would be significant is for a sound change that affected o and a differently. There is in fact such a change, Winter's law, which lengthens the vowels to ō and ā (which don't merge), showing us the distinction. But the only conclusion you can draw from that is that Winter's law occurred before the vowels merged. As far as we can tell, the merger happened before Balto-Slavic split apart, because all Balto-Slavic languages show only a single reflex of both original vowels (a in Baltic, o in Slavic but with evidence of an earlier a > o change in Middle Common Slavic), and there are no post-Balto-Slavic sound changes that require or show evidence for a distinction between a and o. The conclusion then is that they must have been indistinct in Proto-Balto-Slavic itself, and that any difference between them is purely notational.

The genitive of the Turkish noun ''su''

The declension table for the Turkish noun su (water), using the template call {{tr-infl-noun-v|u}}, lists its genitive as sunun. The genitive of su is, however, actually suyun. This is one of the very rare exceptions in Turkish; su is the only word in which the regular buffer consonant n between vowels is replaced by the consonant y. It also applies to the possessives; e.g., the 3rd-person-singular is suyu, not *sunu. Examples: suyun tadı = "the taste of water"; maden suyu = "mineral water". Can you think of a way to fix this, so that the correct form is displayed?

Hebrew roots.

Thank you for your message. It is not right for me to assume an evolutional root for present words from a pre-Babel language. It is a known fact that most of the dialects around Caucasus are entirely distinct. One of them has been stated to be the origin of the Basque grammar; but that is beside the point. No one can prove that many language heads did not start up at the time of the confusion of languages. I, personally like to cite a word that is attested for a stock root, rather than making up a conjectured one. I have had to research into pre-Aryan languages, such as Basque and Finnish, in order to decipher some of the words of unknown origin. To provide an example of an unintelligent conjecture that I made, regarding the origin of Basque for 5 as 'basti', and 'nilar' for 4; but that was just ignorance. The nearest to the stock root is Turkish BESH, (long E). The nasalised Indo-European root, PENKWE answers to most European forms, but Finnish VISI is ultimately allied with Basque BOST. An old Semitic word for 5 is MACH, and they all answer to a stock root, MESH in Hebrew CHAMESH, probably from its usage, in spite of all having distinct languages at the time. Another common Eurasian prefix is MAN, implying habitation in various contexts. This answers to Hebrew MAON (den, or habitation). I have had discussions on this subject with a friend who has a degree in ancient languages.

You'll have to clarify what you mean by "pre-Babel" language or "pre-Aryan", those are not terms I've ever come across before. But what you're doing now is basically pseudoscience. You can't just compare two random words in widely different languages and say that they're related. English is not related to Hebrew, Indo-European is not related to Finnish and not to Basque.

If your friend really has a degree in linguistics, and accepts all of this, then I honestly worry for their contributions to science.

Thank you for your message. I fully realise that two similar words of similar meaning belonging to diverse language families cannot be merely connected without an older stock root from a parent language or analogous words retained in the minds of such speakers. My usage and style was NOT derived from my friend, otherwise I can sympathise with your last sentence. I learned most of my pre-research of ancient languages from 'the Loom of Language' by Bodmer. By pre-Aryan, I was referring the the older family stock of Finn-Ugrian that includes Magyar, parent of Hungarian and Finnish, that as you state, are outside of the Indo-European family. However there was a period when only one language was spoken, that I wrongly believed to be Akkadian as being the first Semetic language to disappear, as well as being antediluvian. Sumerian, as one of ancient languages, was restored and in use until about the time of Sanskrit that led to Prakrit.
It must also be realised that the ancient languages of Britain belonged to different families: it must not be assumed that they were all Indo-European; because, for example, the two main verbs, to be and to possess, in Pictish are strongly connected with those in Basque that is constitutionally separate in its syntax, et cetera, from all the other language heads. Indo-European, for example is, Japhetic, whereas Iberian, or Punic and Hebrew are Semetic. In Cornwall we have the Iron Age Celtic derivative 'DIN...' for a fort, from Celtic 'DUN' whence our word DOWN (hill), possibly through Old Saxon though; whereas the other preposition 'KER' = Welsh 'CAER' is akin to Punic QERETH (town or city), from another stock entirely. It is these oldest words in English that have slipped through the multitude of conquests, that have been my focal point of attention. When writing out all the mediaeval and older words in the English dictionary commencing A and B, eight years ago, I was quite free to admit that only about 0.2% did I need to change. I used the Oxford Etymological Dictionary as my base source. This was a hobbly of mine since I was seventeen.

Where are you getting the idea that at one point only one language was spoken? See w:Proto-Human language, where it's noted that this idea is seriously criticised and linguists consider it unscientific. Even smaller "macro-families" like Nostratic have not gained wide acceptance in linguistics, so Proto-Human is way out there. If we're going to discuss etymology on Wiktionary, you have to at least be aware of and speak in terms of current scientific consensus.

‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig
Thank you so much for this information that I am perusing. I made sure that I perused the sites on Sound Changes, to refresh my mind on Grimm's law and other laws, before editing Talk pages on certain words. My aim is to be available towards perfecting Wiktionary etymologies of illusive words, to make sure that it is indisputably the most reliable reference. Certain Proto Indo-European roots have caused me concern, particularly that of DOWN, where the meaning changes abruptly and could well be criticised by professional etymologists. It is always safer to be able to cite a known language for the period of the unattested = * root, such as Hittite for an axe, under etymology for ADZE, that I always regarded as an Iberian word that remained through the conquests. Since the spelling changes considerably over the years, and there are a number of such words in Spanish, some of which were borrowed into Basque, two or three illusive words may have these remote connections. You may be interested that English BAD is cited in the Guiness Book of Records as the oldest English word; but I reject folk etymologies. All of what you have recommended for me will be essential if I am to edit words seriously. Kind Regards, Andrew

Don't worry Andrew, this whole conflict was worthwhile because at least SOMEBODY (me, namely) is making good use of the intelligence you have posited on here about preBabel and the Basque and Caucasian langs. Still didnt read it.. but wish me luck in finding it if you didnt post it. Hope this doesnt get my server number banned if that's possible from wikipedia, this little notage of support of sorts.